Keith Kyle

At first sight, The Failure of the Eden Government suggests the beginning of a new series to be continued with The Failure of the Macmillan Government, The Failure of the Wilson Government, The Failure of the Heath Government and so forth. As the 30-year rule uncovers the frailties of each in turn of a not particularly glorious row of administrations, opportunities will accumulate. Besides its fairly average quota of what might be called ordinary failures – failure to anticipate problems or failure to act on problems anticipated – the Eden Government will go down in history for the resounding fiasco of its handling of the problem of the Suez Canal. The story has a certain tragic grandeur because Eden had hitherto enjoyed a glamorous and successful career in the field of foreign affairs; it was a massive misjudgment in his own area of expertise that brought him down. Although Richard Lamb says that ‘Eden’s premiership foundered solely because of the Suez affair’ (which begs the question, much discussed at the time in the press, of whether it would not otherwise have soon foundered on something else), his book deals with the record of the Government as a whole. Half of it concerns Suez, its Middle Eastern antecedents and its political and financial consequences; the rest deals with domestic affairs and with other foreign issues.’

‘If my assessment of what is going on is correct, then you will have to go through very serious examinations. If you wish to pass them you must always be yourself. There is something crooked, something faulty about you. Don’t try to conceal it.’

The 40th anniversary of Victory in Europe is a good vantage-point from which to look back on the career of the Supreme Allied Commander under whom in the West that victory was won. It should come as no surprise that in the light of history Dwight Eisenhower’s personal contribution to that immense achievement should appear more considerable than is implied by the titular and public relations role that was sometimes attributed to him. When he went on to become President of the United States, he once more found himself described as a constitutional monarch rather than an executive leader. Yet in the perspective of an unlucky line of successors his completion of two terms of office as popular at the end as at the beginning, with a record of peace and prosperity, a balanced budget for two years running, and a long succession of crises deftly and coolly managed, looks scarcely accidental. The author of this two-volume life, based on prodigious familiarity with the archives and an admirably assured and unfussy style, has been at work on it for twenty years. In the course of that period he has spun off various lengthy by-products, such as a 732-page study of The Supreme Commander: The War Years of General Dwight D. Eisenhower, a five-volume edition of Eisenhower’s war papers, and special studies of Eisenhower and Berlin and even Ike’s Spies: Eisenhower and the Espionage Establishment.

‘It’s not that Ronald Reagan hasn’t got any ideas of his own,’ an American who held high office in the Pentagon under Jimmy Carter remarked recently. ‘The trouble is that he has such peculiar ones.’ He was referring to what has been officially termed the Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI) but what is much more appropriately called Star Wars. It is the President’s idea for making nuclear weapons ‘impotent and obsolete’. With all the fervour of a true believer he has announced that he is staking his faith in America’s scientific and technological genius on the proposition that a carapace can be erected over the United States – and (why not?) over Nato Europe as well. Any and every incoming missile is to be intercepted at some place along the flight path starting with the initial boost phase. After all, Americans produced the atom bomb, they got to the Moon, why not this as well? Reagan wants $26 billion spent on research and then, when American scientists have come up with the secret, they can share it with the Russians – then they will both be safe. Anyone who opposes the project – and some of America’s most distinguished citizens have explained, in lucid prose and with impeccable logic, why it cannot succeed and why it is dangerous to try – can be shown either to lack faith in America’s ability to do anything it really sets out to do or to be morally unwilling to depart from the appalling implications of Mutual Assured Destruction.’

‘There is racial discrimination in Ethiopia,’ a Kenya Luo friend working for the United Nations told me when I arrived in Addis Ababa for the first time some twenty years ago. ‘The Ethiopians are white: everyone else is black, except that a few Europeans and Americans are honorary whites.’ Evelyn Waugh had the same experience. He went to the imperial coronation of Haile Selassie in 1930 and wrote the country up in fiction (Black Mischief) and non-fiction (Remote People). In 1935, he was sent back by the Daily Mail to record the coming Italian invasion (Scoop in fiction and Waugh in Abyssinia in non-fiction). ‘The Abyssinians,’ he writes in Waugh in Abyssinia, ‘in spite of being by any possible standard an inferior race, persisted in behaving as superiors; it was not that they were hostile, but contemptuous.’ They had something to be superior about. At the end of an age of imperialism in which Europeans had made it apparent that an African society was to be judged by whether it had a recognisable government and was ripe for conversion to Christianity. Ethiopia presented the picture of an established ruler and an indigenous Christian tradition of great antiquity.